Ilmselt tekitab see natukene täna Motorolas (MOT) huvi: Lehman upgrades Motorola to Overweight from Equal Weight saying it expects rising production in the third quarter to signal a recovery in the the group's phone unit

Times of London reports profits at the big investment banks of Wall Street and the City of London will collapse by 70% in the second half if the credit crunch proves as fierce as in 1998, Standard & Poor's said yesterday. The debt rating agency predicted that revenues would collapse by 47% in the second half if the dislocation followed a similar pattern to the dark year when Russia defaulted and the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management collapsed. "There's a strong sense of deja vu about the environment for securities firms," Nick Hill, analyst with S&P, said. "This time, rather than a sovereign debt default by Russia, it is rising delinquencies on US sub-prime mortgages that have sparked volatility."

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth. -- Abraham Maslow

One of the most dangerous things about the big swings that the market has been seeing lately is that it causes quick shifts in emotions. When we have a big down day, like we did on Tuesday, when the action is simply horrible, you can't help but feel that we are in for a long and brutal downtrend. Then when we have a powerful bounce, like we did yesterday, you suddenly feel optimistic again and wonder how you could have been so negative and gloomy when obviously things really aren't that bad.

That roller coaster of emotions is particularly dangerous if you find yourself chasing strength and selling weakness, but when we have the DJIA moving 250 points at a time, it's very hard to resist the temptation to make some moves. If your time frame is a day, then you can make some money, but if you're trying to develop a coherent market view by focusing on the intraday action you are likely to just end up feeling very confused.

At the heart of this volatility is the fact that the potential problems are well known but the extent of them isn't. That fear of the unknown keeps the selling pressure on. On the other hand, the Fed is apparently close to cutting interest rates, and most everyone anticipates that is going to produce a powerful rally at least in the short term.

While there certainly seems good reason to be very cautious, no one wants to be on the wrong side of the Fed. Hence this dramatic action every time the Fed does or says anything, even if it is pretty much irrelevant, like releasing old minutes or saying it will do the job it's suppose to do.

How do we handle this? It depends a great degree on your style. If you are quick and nimble and have a very short-term time frame, you can play this intraday action, but if you are looking out a week or so, then you need to have a much higher level of caution and not be fooled by big swings.

I suspect that there are many bulls positioning themselves right now to catch a spike on news that the Fed will cut rates. In essence, they are pricing in that news right now. The problem is that we don't know when a cut will occur, and there is the high degree of danger that some more bad news will hit the market before the Fed acts.

So do we bet on the Fed at this point and hope that it comes through before anything else negative occurs? Ben Bernanke is subtly trying to convey the impression that the Fed's job is to not manage the stock market, which indicates that we need some further proof of broader economic issues to get the Fed moving.

Keep those emotions in check. Things aren't as bad as they looked on Tuesday nor as good as they looked yesterday.

I'm still leaning slightly long as we start the day, but with a very short time frame. I expect the thin trading we are likely to see into the Labor Day weekend to have a positive bias, but we may have bounced too early, and the bulls may not have the juice to keep this going the rest of the week.

We have slight weakness in the early indications, although overseas markets were mostly positive.

ABC reported on their website blog about 20 min ago that United Nations weapons inspectors discovered six to eight vials of a dangerous nerve gas, phosgene, as they were cleaning out offices at a U.N. building in New York this morning, federal authorities tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. The federal authorities said the office, in a U.N. building near headquarters, was being evacuated and the White House had been notified at 10 a.m. New York police and fire officials said federal authorities had not notified them of any problem at the U.N. building, as of 11 a.m. A U.N. spokesperson said a statement would be issued shortly.